Many people believe that the huge cost of drug prohibition is an acceptable price to pay for its purported benefits—reduced drug use and associated health problems, fewer traffic and industrial accidents, and less crime and poverty.

According to economist Jeffrey A. Miron, however, most of the ills typically attributed to drug consumption are due not to drugs per se but to drug prohibition. In Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition, Miron shows that prohibition increases violence, creates new health risks for drug users, enriches criminals, and diminishing our civil liberties. Prohibition, he forcefully argues, is a poor method of reducing drug use and an inappropriate goal for government policy.

The ACIA appears to be guilty of selective use of data. Many of the trends described in the document begin in the 1960s or 1970s -- cool decades in much of the world -- and end in the warmer 1990s or early 2000s. So, for example, temperatures have warmed in the last 40 years, and the implication, "if present trends continue," is that massive warming will occur in the next century. Yet data are readily available for the 1930s and early 1940s, when temperatures were comparable to (and probably higher than) those observed today. Why not start the trend there? Because there is no net warming over the last 65 years?

The rules of polygamy and monogamy are well known to scientists. It's really a matter of simple arithmetic. Into every society is born approximately the same number of males and females. If each takes one mate - if there is "a girl for every boy and a boy for every girl" - then all will all have an approximately equal chance of mating.

If a society tolerates polygamy, however, the equation changes. When one man can take several wives, other men will have none. If there are five eligible males for every four eligible females, for instance, one in five males must remain unmarried.

This creates social tensions. It also creates strategies to deal with these tensions. One is to allow child marriage. Because there is a "wife shortage," men are permitted to reach further down into the female population, marrying girls that have barely reached puberty. In some ancient societies, grown men married infants and waited for them to grow up.

A bubble is good for growth because it creates a low cost environment for experimentation. The results of these experiments may continue to fuel the evolving economy for decades to come. Real bubbles cause long run growth in economic systems that can withstand them. They should be left alone to do so. This is why real liberals don’t worry about real bubbles, and nor should anyone else.

...Rents are the easiest kind of income. A rent is money paid for the use of a capital asset, whether land, a building, an office, a car, a bicycle, or whatever someone might want but cannot or does not want to own. The owner who rents out his assets need only worry about (illegal) damage like vandalism, theft, etc. and about (inevitable) depreciation, where the capital value of the asset declines in time through ordinary use. Loaning money is a kind of renting, where the asset may depreciate through inflation and where there is considerable risk that the borrower may default or go bankrupt. The element of risk introduces an element of profit, but a careful lender can see to it that borrowers have the assents to cover any defaults: and the legal right to recover capital distinguishes renting from a straight investment for profit (where the whole capital can be lost without legal, moral, or any other recourse). Like banks in that respect, most renting enterprises mix rents with profits: they invest for profit by running a business where they collect rents.

Because rents are the easiest and most secure kind of income, it is natural for people to want income from rents rather than principally from profits or wages, and to want rents that involve the least risk and labor as enterprises. This motive is called "rent-seeking," and there is nothing wrong with it. Indeed, those who collect rents in an economy serve the valuable function of seeking to maintain and preserve capital assets. It becomes wrong when rent-seeking means trying to collect rents off of capital that is not the rightful possession of the rent-seeker. This can be legally accomplished through the means that secure the rights of property in the first place: politics and the law. Through political influence people can be given ownership of things that are not their property, or should not be anyone's property. ...

The views of pundits and politically motivated activists from myriad disciplines are often aired in the debate about climate impacts. Raising fears of future harms, these people promote proposals which, if implemented by policymakers, would often be more detrimental to humanity than the alleged harms they seek to prevent.

EIGHTEEN months after its introduction, London’s congestion charge has largely ceased to be controversial. The transport and environmental benefits are beyond doubt and the predicted social drawbacks have not materialised. A few concerns remain about the effects of the charge on some businesses in central London but these have been inflamed by the business interests that always opposed it. Meanwhile the success of the charge has been such that it has carried Ken Livingstone back for a second term as London’s mayor, after forcing the Labour party to readmit him and admit that its concerns about the charge were ill-founded.

The aim of the congestion charge was honest and explicit: to reduce traffic congestion by reducing traffic volume by 10 to 15 per cent. To achieve this, drivers are required to pay £5 per day if they enter central London between 7am and 6.30pm, Monday to Friday. In the event the reduction in traffic has been greater than anticipated. Overall traffic entering the zone is down 18 per cent during charging hours, with a reduction in car traffic of 30 per cent and a similar reduction in congestion. There has been little displacement of traffic into areas round the zone or additional congestion on the ring road. Motorists themselves have benefited; for those who still drive in the zone, journeys are quicker and more reliable.

... Naturally, the Republican electoral machine was thrilled that bin Laden moved electoral politics back onto more favorable terrain-national security. According to the New York Times, Richard N. Bond, a former Republican national chairman, noted that the video was a “reminder for all Americans that America is under attack-and who can be the best commander in chief in the war on terror is the central issue of this campaign.”

But why would bin Laden want to help his ostensible nemesis get reelected? Maybe because the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” has done more to help al Qaeda than anything since the invention of gunpowder. Instead of using elite U.S. troops to capture or kill bin Laden during the war in Afghanistan, Bush allowed him to get away by relying on unreliable Afghan warlords.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Bush then fell into bin Laden’s trap. Terrorists and guerrillas-weaker players-use the standard tactic of attacking a stronger party to get an overreaction that will enable them to recruit more fighters, supporters and financial contributors. Bush’s quixotic post-9/11 flailing about for unrelated enemies to vanquish in Iraq, a nation that practices Islam and has Muslim holy sites, was such an overreach. In addition to siphoning off valuable U.S. intelligence capabilities and Special Forces from hunting bin Laden to deposing Saddam, Bush’s use of 9/11 as an excuse to embark on the Iraqi excursion actually increased the threat to Americans from terrorism. ...

... the least pleasant places in the world to live normally have three features in common: First, low economic growth; second, policies that discourage growth; and third, resistance to the idea that other policies would be better. I have a theory to explain this curious combination.3 Imagine that the three variables I just named—growth, policy, and ideas—capture the essence of a country's economic/political situation. Then suppose that three "laws of motion" govern this system. The first two are almost true by definition:

1. Good ideas cause good policies.2. Good policies cause good growth.

The third law is much less intuitive:

3. Good growth causes good ideas.

The third law only dawned on me when I was studying the public's beliefs about economics,4 and noticed that income growth seems to increase economic literacy, even though income level does not. In other words, poor people whose income is rising—like recent immigrants—have more than the average amount of economic sense; rich people whose income is falling—like the Kennedy family—have less.

This bare-bones model has a surprising implication: There is more than one outcome with staying power.5 The good news is that you can have favorable results across the board. Good ideas lead to good policy, good policy leads to good growth, and good growth reinforces good ideas. The bad news is that you can also get mired in the opposite outcome. A society can get stuck in an "idea trap," where bad ideas lead to bad policy, bad policy leads to bad growth, and bad growth cements bad ideas.

...

If both good and bad combinations of growth, policy, and ideas are stable, why does anything ever change? The answer, in my model, is luck. An economy in the idea trap usually stays in the idea trap. But once in a while, it wins a little lottery. Maybe the president of the country happens to read Bastiat during his last term, and decides to try a more free-market approach. This increases growth, which in turn improves the climate of public opinion. And maybe—just maybe—public opinion changes enough to elect another president who embraces his predecessor's reforms. ..